AuthorTopic: wifi-radar problems (solved) (Read 12877 times)

My Netgear MA401 card worked fine on my HP Omnibook 900b running Vector 5.8 for a couple of months. And still does if I know the ESSID. However, the wifi-radar daemon stopped showing up in the Network menu a while back. When run in root terminal, wifi-radar works fine if I am already connected via vwifi-connect but if not already connected, it loops, saying "eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down"

So, naturally, knowing everything there is to know about everything, I decided to fix it by clicking on SKEL (Reset default settings) in user VASM and now have just the Xfce menu (not the pretty Vector menu). Oh well.

Any suggestions on either of these problems is appreciated. I am getting along fine with Xfce and vxwifi-connect but would like wifi-radar for when I am in strange wifi areas. Actually, I like Xfce so well I might not go back to Vector's desktop, even if I figure out how. But I would like to know how to do so. Have reloaded wifi-radar several times without success. Probably need to change something to eth1 before it will work but not sure how.

FWIW, I have the similar "eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down" messages scroll by in the terminal after starting wifi-radar from terminal. I've just assumed it was a repetative broadcast beacon trying to find an access point because once I connect to my local AP the messages stop scrolling by.

I also had wifi-radar disappear from my xfce menu after upgrading. I found that I had to fix the .desktop file to get it to show back up. As root, I editted my /usr/share/applications/wifi-radar.desktop file and had to alter the 'Exec=' command to read 'Exec=gksu wifi-radar' (no quotes of course). Maybe this will help you.

And I'm not sure how to bring back the VL xfce menu, but I'd sure like to know

Can you post the contents of wifi-radar.desktop? It seems that if one letter is incorrect then the option won't show in the menu. You should be able to output the contents via 'cat /usr/share/applications/wifi-radar.desktop' in the terminal.

I note that when following the Wireless Instructions (try this first) page, it does not seem to recognize my MA401 card. It did, I believe, before I did whatever I did to it. At least wifi-radar worked fine when I first started using that card. Now here is the wifi-radar.desktop file:

I don't have enough experience in troubleshooting wireless hardware problems to give advice. You should probably start a new thread on your wireless hardware problem to get more visability on that problem.

Regarding the .desktop file I would try changing the Exec part to read:

I have been thinking of reloading Vector and wondering what I would write over if I did. I have a swap partition, a programs partition (contains Vector 5.8, lyx, postgres, etc) and a data partition. I just don't have confidence that I wouldn't somehow mess up my data files if I reloaded. So, being chicken, I will probably just continue to do with vwifi-connect for a while. I may try a new thread as you suggest if I don't figure out something soon.

I once had to reload VL on top of itself. I had three partitions; /, /home, swap. I chose to only format root (/) and mounted the existing /home as /home without formatting. It worked out okay. I did chose a difference username and userID on the reload so that it didn't affect the already existing username/ID.

Tried Newtor's wifi configuration and it cleaned up the wifi gui, but it still doesn't seem to scan.

John

Maybe I've totally overlooked an obvious, but you stated that you will see the message "eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down" when starting wifi-connect via the terminal. Generally, eth0 is the wired LAN port which technically doesn't support scanning (at least it doesn't support scanning in the 'wireless' sense), so maybe the message is not as important as it may seem.

Have you created a new profile/account via the wifi-connect 'Add' option? If so, does the profile/account show up as an option to connect to?

I think I should mark this topic "solved." Unbeknownst to me, it did scan after I replaced my wifi-configuration with Newtor's. I discovered that this last weekend when on a trip. It didn't scan automatically on program-start - -I had to try to "connect" to one of my saved ESSIDS, but once I did that it scanned quite well. So I am happy. I like the way it works now and am therefore a bit afraid to try a reinstall with gslapt. I had tried that before without success.

As an aside, I am still not able to get back the pretty Vector desktop, but don't mind Xfce at all.Yet. Someday I will look through the topics and see what if anything I can do about this.